The Transformation of the Music Industry in the 21st Century
by George Ziemann — August, 2010
A new school year is underway and it’s time to give all the college researchers something new to chew on.
I’ve been studying the recording industry statistics for 8 years, a move which was prompted by the RIAA interfering with my attempts to sell my own music on eBay in 2002. Over those 8 years, a brief instant in the history of recorded music, the entire game has changed and it will never be the same again.
There are a few numbers to show, some data to analyze, but the real story cannot be found in any industry reports. In fact, the more I look at the labels’ year-end reports, what the RIAA and Nielsen put out, it becomes more obvious that it’s all pretty worthless. Not one of them holds the real story. Not even a fraction of it.
You can memorize every fact and figure from Nielsen’s data and still not know a fucking thing about what is happening in the music business.
But the truth is out there. And once you start putting the pieces together, the big picture is hard to ignore.
My original vision of this article was divided into several sections, each with a specific focus. But that’s because I was trying to be all academic about it. All that does is needlessly confuse the issue. It’s really very simple, so I’m going to keep it that way.
Conclusions
New Releases — U.S. (1992 to 2009)
What I saw in 2002 was that the RIAA was trying to create a self-fulfilling prophesy. What if they moaned and cried about Napster and nothing really happened. So they made sure sales would drop by simply putting out less product. Then, in 2003 and 2004, they ramped back up a little and sales actually came back in 2004. Seemed like simple cause and effect at the time.
But what happened from 2005 to 2009? Releases went through the roof, but sales didn’t come with them.
I’ll leave you to ponder over that for a minute. Now let’s look at Canada, some StatCan data provided by Kent Clark, a Loyal Reader from the Great White North.
The Canadian data is rather odd. It doesn’t follow the cause and effect model either. (I’m assuming “Other” is the independent releases, by the way. We’re unmentionable, like sirty underwear or something.)
The majors slashed their new releases between 2003 and 2007, and sales actually went up. Maybe the Canadian branches of the major labels actually got more efficient at connecting with the audience. Maybe Nettwerk Records has a lot to do with it, too.
And if you broke the U.S. out between the major labels and the rest of us, it would show that the majors were running about 7,000 new releases a year at the turn of the century. Since then, each and every label has slashed their rosters, cut back their staff and generally went into a panic mode. I’d be surprised if they put out a total of more than 4,000 new releases between them last year.
Here’s the big difference between the U.S. and Canada:
When I started writing about the RIAA in 2002, nobody had a clue who they were. I had to always explain it. Now, pretty much every college student in the country knows all about them. I don’t have to explain it. The RIAA is the group of assholes that sued 40,000 people for listening to music. And every year since they really got going, sales have dropped by 15 to 20 percent. What a big surprise.
Canadians haven’t been sued. Yet.
There’s still a cause and effect going on, but it’s based on knowledge, not numbers.
The thing is, all of this is such a miniscule part of the actual music industry, especially in the United States. Nielsen is considered to be the most reliable infor mation. It’s what people turn to when they want to find out what’s happening as far as data goes.
But Nielsen doesn’t have half the story.
The Unreported Sales
If you add up all the available new release figure from 1992 to 2009, you’re going to come up with a total in the neighborhood of 735,000 new releases.
Go take a look at CDBaby’s “About” page. According to CDBaby, they are “the largest online distributor of independent music.” And they’ll give you their numbers.
278,510 albums being sold on CD Baby
5,339,025 CDs sold online to customers
$107,769,092 paid directly to the artists
The stat there that I’m keying on is 278,510 albums being sold. That’s a full third of what Nielsen reports to have been released since 1992.
In 1996, Tunecore arrived. They’re a little less public with their numbers, but I know that last year, they claimed 90,000 new releases, just about the same as Nielsen reported for the entire industry. Unless CDBaby went on a hiatus for the year, obviously there’s a huge pile missing. And what about the majors and what they distribute?
Makes Nielsen’s numbers obviously useless to determine what’s really happening. So what is happening?
I talked to Derek Sivers, who sold CDBaby off to DiskMakers around 2007-2008. He said that when he left, they had been taking orders for around 200 new album releases every day. That’s more than 70,000 new releases in a year, which is just slightly under what Nielsen shows for the entire industry. I don’t know how many actually were added to the stores. Derek couldn’t tell me that, but did say that the majority of them were orders for 100 to 1000 copies to be duplicated.
What happened after these copies hit the streets and landed in the laps of the musicians that ordered them?
And what about all of us with the time, patience and means to simply burn our own CDs? I’m using Tunecore to place our music on iTunes (Hayden’s Wall and Hurricane Alley — go buy a damn copy so I can pay the electric bill). But the truth is that we sold about 50 copies off the edge of the stage for every one that we sold online.
Nielsen never counted any of them. Or any of the CDs that the other thousands upon thousands of independent acts sold off the stage. Hell, most of them probably didn’t even report it on their taxes (Dear IRS — I did).
The Conclusion
“What you’ll see in the near future is a million artists and about 500,000 labels, and many artists becoming their own labels. The whole album paradigm will be redefined. It will be a singles market place and it will be shared by a million hands.”
Chuck D. — July, 2000
Since 2003, Apple has song more singles than the music industry did over it’s entire history prior to the iTunes Music Store. 10 billion songs, last I heard.
Services like Tunecore have been singled out for criticism by people like Tommy Silverman, who will tell you that 80 percent of the artists using Tunecore to get into Apple are crap because they sell 100 copies or less in a year.
“Those are the people who are using TuneCore and iTunes to clutter the music environment with crap, so that the artists who really are pretty good have more trouble breaking through than they ever did before.”
Silverman missed two very important points.
The first is that 80% crap is still a 20% success rate. The RIAA only claims 5% success. So that’s 95% crap. And Silverman’s record is no better.
Tunecore lets anybody through. The labels pick and choose. Tunecore has a higher success ratio. Draw your own conclusions on that one.
The second point is that as little as 6 years ago, none of those artists selling less than 100 copies were in retail at all. We sold zero copies online. So even one sale is better.
The thing I’m focusing on from Silverman’s statement is this: “…the artists who really are pretty good have more trouble breaking through than they ever did before.”
That seems a little ridiculous as a general statement. Just having an album (or 100,000 albums), on iTunes doesn’t interfere with anyone’s sales. They don’t bury other releases (like the majors used to do with cover songs, where a minor hit would come along and all the big stars would record their version which would literally “cover” the original release at the retail level).
iTunes works kind of like peer-to-peer, in the sense that you generally have to know what you’re looking for in order to find it. If you type in “Mariah Carey,” that’s what you’re going to get. Nothing gets in the way.
Maybe the major artists have more trouble breaking through than ever before, but that’s because the RIAA taught the college students to hate them.
And let’s talk reality. It hasn’t been “the artists who are really pretty good” that have been at the top of the heap for decades. Not since disco hit. Now it’s the ones who are willing to sell out for quick cash, follow the rules, fit themselves into the mold of the flavor of the month and whore themselves out.
Being talented has almost nothing to do with it. It’s all about your ability to do business, not your skill at playing music. That’s why we have autotune.
Back to the point, which is that today’s music business simply cannot be seen in the industry reports. You can pile up all the stats and data and the real music business just isn’t in it. It’s out on the streets.
Times are tough. People have less money than ever to toss around on music. Nothing against Tom Petty (he’s just my favorite star to pull out as an example), but if I get $10 from you for a CD sold off the end of the stage on Friday night, you might have to pass up on Tom’s new album when you spot it on Saturday.
And there are hundreds of thousands of other acts doing the same thing, almost every night of the week (your mileage may vary depending on the size of the town). The artists “who are really pretty good” are selling records.
But they’re not on the charts. The charts don’t tell you anything.
In the last 10 years or so, from mp3s, CD-Rs and the internet, then the ability to get into the world’s largest retailer while completely bypassing the traditional label system, the entire paradigm of the music industry has changed. No one sees it all. No one knows how to measure it. Everything is upside-down and off the charts.
It’s a new day, a new beginning.
The beginning is a very delicate time. — Frank Herbert, Dune
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